Tag Archives: motherhood

the Gift

24 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by in Motherhood, seasons, Writing

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Posted 2011.

I was given an unexpected gift.  I was able to turn back the clock, on a snowy day in January.  I was able to live an experience that I’ve regretted missing the first time, and thought was gone forever.  A writer can rewrite chapters, but who has that luxury in life?

I often feel a bittersweet-ness as my kids grow up — the wonder of seeing both boys become functioning future citizens, and the simultaneous mourning of the little boy days left behind.  The days of toys and picture books.  The days of trains.

The Professor was the one who lived and breathed trains, from age two until what we can now refer to as the Unfortunate Nascar Years.  Trains, every day– the first thing he talked about in the morning and last thing discussed at night.  When he first learned his dad was an engineer, his excitement surely stemmed from the belief that Dad drove the trains.

The Little One’s interest in trains seemed to stem more from the need to do whatever his older brother did, and then the thrill of systematically destroying his brother’s meticulously crafted layouts.  I remember little of the days we can now refer to as the The Dark Years, when each day seemingly ended in wailing and gnashing of teeth in biblical proportions.  Granted, this only lasted from approximately 2001 – 2006, which if you do the math is… well, many, many days where I knew I should feel grateful for the priceless opportunity to be a full-time mom, but I often didn’t.  I wished many of those days away.  If I published a memoir of journal entries from that time, the volume would serve as an excellent form of birth control.

It is entirely possible that I never played trains with The Little One for more than 10 minutes in all those years.  He was such a Pocket Nazi during his formative train-playing days that I would lose my temper with him often, and have to remove myself from the situation before I went all out and lost my mind.  I loved that kid fiercely, but let’s just say I frequently needed to count backwards from 100.  Thousand.  I’ll leave it at that.

I thought about the trains, and many of their old toys, just last week when we cleaned the entire house in preparation for guests.  As we piled toys onto basement shelves and closets, it became clear that a thorough sweep of the Basement Land of Misfit Toys is long overdue.  He kept saying “Ooooh, I remember THAT!” and wanting to take things out while I was putting them in.  He’s a tween, half demanding to be grown-up NOW, and half still a little boy.  Someday soon we will purge the toys that they have not played with in years, I thought to myself, with a twinge of… something, undefined.

Then, during yet another snow day home from school, The Little Man unexpectedly carried the impossibly heavy bin of wooden trains upstairs — the old, well-worn Thomas trains and bridges and tracks – and he looked at me.  Without a word, we went together into the den and we played trains on the floor.  Together.  I had so much fun, and he did too. We took a picture of the final creation.  I think I’ll frame it in a double frame, with an old picture I have of him, “Colezilla”, stomping through a huge train layout with a look of devilish glee.

In those old days, I never had the patience.  I was always too busy trying to find time to be me.  Now I was given the incredible gift of a do-over.  A mulligan of motherhood.  And I treasured every minute.

Becoming a writer was just a dream back then.  I saw many women were able to combine motherhood and writing very successfully;  I had not yet reached that chapter, in those years.  Today I have the space to write, and play, on a magical, snowglobe-y day.

letters to camp

15 Sunday Aug 2010

Posted by in Motherhood, seasons

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This summer, The Little One went to his first-ever overnight camp, five nights in a cabin in the woods.  Swimming, archery, campfires, horseback riding, night hikes with the fireflies — this was the real deal, just as I always imagined camp would look like, based on the book settings and movie locations and my imagination.

Since he was a first time Camper, I was the corresponding first time Camper Mom.  I had a lot of questions.  I knew I could be very brave.  I read all the camper instructions on the website, packed the five t-shirts and five pairs of shorts, the bug spray and sunscreen, and labeled everything as he packed it into his stuffed duffel.

The website said no calls and no visits all week, but we could write letters to our camper if we wanted.  To have the letters delivered each day, they suggested we label each envelope with the day of week, and drop off all the letters at the camp office on Sunday.

This presented a bit of a challenge, since it is harder to write newsy, interesting accounts of family events at home that have not yet actually happened.  So I did what any self-respecting mother would do, and made everything up.

One the eve of his departure, the boy’s biggest concern was not that he knew no one there, or the scary camp mashed potatoes, or snakes, or thunderstorms — his greatest fear was that his brother would have fun at home without him.

Normally this would be the perfect setup for that special kind of torture that makes parenting worthwhile, but I was already missing the little bugger and he had not even left yet.  Plus, I knew that deep down, he was terrified of being homesick.  So instead, I sat down on that Sunday morning with the yellow notebook pad and wrote all about our week at home, the days of tedium and torture, long days that were NO FUN AT ALL without him:

Monday:  begin knitting lessons for his brother.  Lose satellite reception and have to resort to reading the dictionary out loud to pass the hours of mind-numbing boredom.  Read and read and read until we make it all the way to the letter D.  Watch the grass grow. Hope you are having more fun than we are.

Tuesday:  Continue to read the dictionary out loud, continuing late into the evening to make it to letter M.  More knitting for your brother, as he tries to finish the sleeves.  This is after he has to brush the dog’s teeth with the squirrel-flavored toothpaste.

Wednesday:  Celebrate reaching the letter R in the dictionary by eating only foods that begin with R all day: rhubarb, rutabagas, radishes — and that was just breakfast.  Your brother has resorted to cleaning the litterbox with the dog’s toothbrush just for fun because he cannot find anything else to do.

Thursday:  after many hours of knitting, the sweater your brother is making for you did not “turn out right”. Maybe we can use it as a potholder instead.  We finished the dictionary last night and we do not want to talk about how many hours it took.

Friday:  Can’t wait to see you tonight!

We picked him up Friday night.  He had the most exciting week of his life.  He looked older, more confident.  And he looked torn when we walked up, a simultaneous “I don’t ever want to leave this place”,  and “I can’t wait to get back home.”  He had been homesick, but he was brave.  And, it turns out, after the emotional roller coaster of independence and activity, the unfamiliar and the fun, he was so mentally fried that he believed all the letters I had written were real accounts of life at home, that all the newsy news I shared had indeed happened.

I felt a little guilty, but only for a moment.  The end almost certainly justifies the means, not to mention that lying to my kids has been the cornerstone of my publishing credits.  Perhaps the news of his brother’s boredom had soothed his soul during the dark hours of the night.  I think the letters did make him smile, because he saved them and brought them home, damp and crumpled much like all the possessions that made it back into the duffel.

Because I had a large pile of unopened mail on the counter for days, I found the  letter he wrote to us FROM camp long after he returned.  He did not even remember writing it.

The note was sweet, written with a stubby pencil on the writing desk of his knee, slightly self-conscious and clearly trying hard to not think about being homesick.  He wrote that the food was good and camp was fun.  Then he signed it with his full signature, in case we were confused about which kid had not been home all week.

Like I had not been sneaking into his room while he was gone and laying my head on his pillow to breathe the lingering still-sweet smell of little boy.

Oops.  Did I write that out loud?

I missed him an embarrassingly ridiculous amount, which of course made this an invaluable experience for all involved.  He had a great week.  Separation is good, and reunions are so sweet.

Life is funny, or why I started screaming at the TV

10 Monday May 2010

Posted by in Motherhood, Writing

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Have I mentioned before that life is funny?  It bears mentioning again, because it is the only explanation I have for why my Mother’s Day included blood-curdling screams.

Like most of my adventures, this one started out innocently enough.  As I have mentioned 53 times already, I attended a writing conference a few weeks ago.  By chance, CBS Sunday Morning was also at the event, filming a segment for Mother’s Day about Erma and how her humor helped revolutionize the way America viewed the career of Motherhood.  Tracy Beckerman, humor columnist, blogger, conference speaker, and author of the book Rebel Without a Minivan, was on deck as a feature interview for the show.  Tracy is smart and funny, and she signed my copy of her book even though I do drive a minivan, and I once commented on her blog “Lost in Suburbia”, and we are friends on Facebook, so really I’m almost a real friend,  stalker,  quasi-acquaintance, so I tuned in to see her (and, truth be told) to try to catch a glimpse of my aforementioned disastrous haircut from behind, somewhere in the crowd.

The TV cameras were around every day, filming many, many hours of mingling attendees and numerous workshop sessions.  No biggie, until they popped up in a session where I stood up and shared some very personal information as part of writing exercise on our greatest fears and most embarrassing moments.*

*A lethal combination.

I felt rattled to have a camera in my face while speaking, but was reassured that with 350 attendees, many speakers and an estimated 147 hours of raw video footage, I need not give it another thought.

So, fast forward to 9:00 Mother’s Day morning, and I know the show is on but I have recorded it on the DVR so I would not interrupt the family making a fuss over me early on my day. Watching Tracy would be fun, but I knew the enthusiasm for showering me with gifts and cards would too soon come to an end, so I wanted to savor it.  Indeed, my guys gave me a wonderful day.

As the fawning masses were running out of steam later in the late afternoon, I settled in and cranked up the DVR.  The segment was a sweet piece about Erma and motherhood, with fun interviews of her kids.  It included cute little cross-stitch segment transitions of Erma quotes, such as “Insanity is hereditary — you get it from your kids.”  Fade that first cross-stitch, and there is my face.

I found this shocking.  I started screaming.  I don’t know why.  It was so not cool.  I bet Tracy did not scream at the TV.  I was on the screen for five seconds, and said one sentence.

The Little One came rushing up the basement stairs to see if I was being murdered — apparently seeing myself on TV when I don’t expect to see myself on TV makes me emit a blood-curdling type of scream.  We didn’t know that about me, but now we do, for future reference.

It is a good thing to know, because life is funny.